Saturday, September 5, 2015

Remember Bengals player Devon Still, who the Cincinnati NFL team rallied around for his daughter Leah, who was diagnosed with cancer? Still played several games with the Bengals last season, and has in fact not made the team this year after the pre-season cut.

Still played 12 games for the Bengals last season. He recorded 19 total tackles.

In 2014, the Bengals kept Still on the team's practice squad to help him financially with his daughter Leah's cancer diagnosis. He eventually joined the 53-man roster.

In March of this year, Still announced his daughter Leah's cancer was in remission. As of July, Leah's cancer is still in remission.

Because Still was on the Bengals’ roster last year, he and his daughter will have five years of NFL health insurance, even if Still is not on an NFL roster, reportsThe Cincinnati Enquirer's Paul Dehner.

Some good news out the Bengals camp this year, even if the team itself is probably destined for another first-round playoff exit.

States should decide: Mrs. Fiorina has said that setting a minimum wage should be “a state decision, not a federal decision,” because of differences in the cost of living around the country. Many Republicans who want to leave the federal minimum where it is, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Scott Walker, make basically the same argument.

Experience shows that state minimums are inadequate without a robust federal minimum. Today, 21 states do not impose minimums higher than $7.25, which was already too low when it was mandated by Congress in 2007. None of the other 29 states have minimums high enough to cover local expenses for an individual worker. In New York, including New York City, the minimum will top out at $9 at the end of this year, even though it takes an hourly wage of $12.75 for one person to cover living costs in the state.

If there were no federal minimum, states would be free to perpetuate poverty level wages. Under the law in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, there is no state minimum wage; in Georgia and Wyoming, the state minimums are $5.15 an hour.

The market should decide: Jeb Bush has said that ideally each state’s minimum wage would be decided by the “private sector.” Mr. Walker and Senator Rand Paul have said much the same thing; Mr. Paul could have been speaking for the pack when he said the “minimum wage is only harmful when it’s above the market wage.”

Markets do reliably establish the prices of goods and services when businesses have to compete. When businesses compete for workers, for example, wages rise because employees gain a modicum of bargaining power. The law has long recognized, however, that low-wage workers seldom have bargaining power. An adequate federal minimum wage effectively substitutes for that lack.

Businesses will be hurt: Donald Trump has said a higher minimum wage would make it impossible for American companies to compete with low-paying foreign rivals. That stance is baffling given his stated aim to “make America great again,” because broad prosperity requires rising wages, not a race to the bottom with countries whose economies are built on low pay.

Robots will replace workers: Senator Marco Rubio has been trotting out this scare tactic at every opportunity: “I don’t want to deny someone $10.10. I’m worried about the people whose wages are going to go down to zero because you’ve made them more expensive than a machine.”

But keeping worker pay low to discourage capital investment is a recipe for a faltering economy and ignores history, in which new technology has bothreplaced and created jobs.

Here's the greater argument as to why every single Republican take on the minimum wage is complete hogwash: All of them at some point include the absolute falsehood that businesses will invest profits in worker wages. You have only to look at our current economy, with wages having stagnated for 40 years, productivity up dramatically, and and record corporate profits to see that unless federal law is there to set a floor, businesses will pay workers as little as possible whenever possible in order to "maximize shareholder value".

American businesses have been doing everything they can to reduce wages.

In other head-to-head matchups, Trump beats out Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by 44 percent to 40 percent; Vice President Joe Biden by 44 percent to 42 percent; and former Vice President Al Gore by 44 percent to 41 percent.

The poll also found that 30 percent of respondents believe Trump will eventually be the Republican nominee, leading the field.

Kind of interesting to see this, as it proves that Trump motivates the GOP base, unlike depressing it like, say, Rick Perry or Jeb Bush.

It's also just one poll, but Republicans are certainly ready to vote for him, and Democrats are still at the "meh, whatever" stage.

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With Republicans controlling the House and Senate and the Trump Regime now in charge of the Executive, there's still a crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.

Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.

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